Jax Miller - Freedom’s Child

After Mom died, we spent a few months with the Delaneys until we’d gotten our own place, a house we bought on Huntington Drive with the money I’d inherited from my mother, an inheritance that turned all of the Delaneys into my best friends overnight. But on one particular night at the Delaney house, I was about four months pregnant, Mark didn’t come home.

See, your father and I were kids at the time, excited at the thought of playing mom and dad at such a young age without knowing what parenthood really meant. Lynn Delaney was the only parent Mark was familiar with, so the recipe was already toxic. I was just too young to see it at the time.

It was the night before his graduation from the NYPD academy, and the neighborhood was already preparing the party. Not a bad idea to know a cop on the inside, the delinquents around the block would say. The rest of the Delaneys were fast asleep, but for your uncle Peter, the only one of your father’s brothers that I ever cared for. Peter was this brilliant and kind man confined to a wheelchair, and probably the best friend I ever had in all my life. I miss him from time to time, think about calling him once in a while. But that would breach my contract with the whippersnappers. Peter and I talked about anything and everything, from our disagreements with the Delaneys to the unpleasant changes of pregnancy, from politics and science to movies and comics.

But anyway, it was close to 4:00 a.m., and in walked a stumbling Mark, a nightclub stamp on the back of his hand, the smell of peppermint schnapps and cologne seeping from his skin. I should note that while at the academy the past few months, the eyeliner and leather was traded in for CK One body spray and button-downs. He toppled a side table on the way in, ash and cigarette butts scattering on the floor.

“Mark, where the hell have you been?” I shushed. “Your graduation is in a few hours.”

“Why don’t you mind your own fucking business, you slut,” he said, his mouth wet from drink and eyes glassed over. “Whose baby is that, anyways?”

“You sh-sh-shouldn’t talk to her like that,” said Peter.

“Oh, yeah?” And there, for the first time, I saw your father with this particular look, one that turned his eyes to black, one that sent a chill through my bones. He leaned over and reached under Peter’s wheelchair. He wanted to humiliate Peter, and he succeeded when he pulled a black pouch from under his chair, a pouch full of Texas catheters. He took his car keys and began to stab the bag that held Peter’s urine. The bag burst on Peter’s lap. Your father burst out in laughter.

“What the hell are you doing?” I slapped his shoulder.

“Get away from me.” He pushed me hard enough that I fell backward.

I should have left right then. Rebekah, take this advice. The second a man touches you like that, run as far as you can. But I was a stupid kid, a stupid kid who stayed. With my mother dead, I had nowhere to go. And in my head at that time, I’d thought that staying with an asshole was a better alternative than raising my child without a father.

After he stumbled back to his bedroom, I helped Peter in the dark, but I could feel his face burn red in the night. “How could you be with a monster like that?” He tried not to cry. “How could you let a man like that father your own flesh and blood?”

My name is Freedom and my blood is sand. That’s what it feels like when I get overhyped, when my head spins and I can’t stop it. It’s a side effect of trying to keep up with Earth as it spins on its axis, is all. Docs pass it off as mental illness. I call it eccentricity. There is nothing wrong with eccentricity. And I don’t need to take the stupid meds. I keep the pills. I go to the leftmost cabinet in my kitchen and grab my suicide jar.

“Almost at the top.” I swallow hard and bite my lip until I taste pennies. “Maybe another day or two.” I screw the lid back on to the old mayo jar and hide it between the cans of peas and tuna fish.

I force myself back down. I’m still too hungover from last night to drink right now, so instead I listen to Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That song makes my skin crawl and my stomach drop. It was my son’s favorite. I listen to it until I am on the brink of suicide. When my mind is there and I’m ready to grab a dull kitchen knife and trace the veins in my wrist, I’ll call Cal for the distraction. He’s used to it.

What time is it? Twelve? After Carrie said I could go home, I had a small run-in with the Viper Boys, a few regulars who think they’re something to fear. All they did was suffocate everyone else in the establishment with Cuban cigar smoke and brag about their cars … Vipers. It’s the only thing that probably ever gets them laid. One of them bear-hugged me from behind and burned the back of my shoulder with a cigar in his teeth. Douchebag. Passion tried to jump in, but she knows I can take care of myself. I head-butted him with the back of my skull, so all is now forgiven. He’ll forget it by morning. I grab some Neosporin to put on the burn, but it’s just out of reach between my shoulder blades. I use the end of a toothbrush. That works.

I’m back on the countertop with the phone still in the cabinet. Why aren’t you picking up, Cal? After a long day’s work I can smell myself. Cal’s not answering his phone and Judy Garland fails to bring me down to suicidal levels. What a bitch. I’ll just go for a stroll. Wait, can’t leave Johnnie Walker Red behind.

I walk to my favorite spot, Sovereign Shore, for a bit of isolation and a chance to escape the carnival in my brain, as me and the voices in my head speak different languages. I walk under the streetlights and think of The Exorcist , and not even the “Tubular Bells” theme as I walk in the middle of the cold night is enough to bring my mind down to a more quiet and bearable level. Ha, look at the tree with the burned bark. Thank God it’s a different mailman now, I’d hate to look at him again.

Anyway. The suicidal thoughts come and go as they please. I have no control over them I’ll have you know, it’s a full-time job. Mental illness, if that’s what you want to call it. I’m telling ya, Doc, I’m merely eccentric . It’s like constantly hosting a huge party for all these guests you really don’t care for. Truly. Those unwanted guests who want to eat all your food and don’t grasp the first million hints to get the hell out of your home. I think that’s the best way to describe it. I have reached my destination.

The spray of the ocean is at its warmest this time of year, but the air is colder as I climb onto the craggy rocks in the pitch black underneath a moonless night. All that’s to be heard are the sounds of oxygenated bubbles rising to the bottom of the bottle and the crashes of salt below. The scotch burns, and so I cough it out into the gusts that knot up my red hair.

* * *

I think back to the day I knew I’d never see my kids again. That was twenty years ago. The word dismissed ricocheted around in my skull for two weeks after I was released from prison. Dismiss: verb. To order or allow to leave; to send away. Vanessa Delaney, the charge of second-degree murder against you is to be dismissed with prejudice .

I sat in an office behind chambers in family court, not far from where I was charged with killing my husband two years prior. I waited for Sharon Goodwyn, a plump and pale woman with no nose, only holes in her face that made her look like a black-haired swine. She was the caseworker in charge of overseeing my children’s adoption after I was charged. And I hadn’t seen her since. But I remember her well, and I remember wishing that some homeless diseased freak would jump her in an alleyway for taking pride in a case that took away my children even though I was wrongfully accused.